Most photographers find their image in the world. Adrien Broom builds the world first, in one colour, and then steps inside it.
A child, and a room of a single hue
The Color Project follows a girl moving through a sequence of rooms, each one entirely immersed in a single saturated colour — a chamber drowned in red, another in deep blue, another in gold. These are not digital washes or coloured lights bolted on after the fact. Broom is a set-builder as much as a photographer, and the spaces are physically constructed and dressed top to bottom in their chosen colour: walls, floor, furniture, objects and the child's own costume all tuned to the same note. The effect is total — less a photograph of a colour than a photograph taken from inside one.
Theatre that happens to be still
The work belongs to a tradition of staged, fabricated photography in which the image is the last step of an elaborate piece of theatre. Broom's roots are in production and scenic design, and it shows: the lighting is painterly, the mood dreamlike and faintly theatrical, the narrative implied rather than spelled out. Each monochrome room reads as an emotional weather system — the warmth and danger of red, the melancholy and calm of blue — with the child as the single figure feeling her way through them. It is colour theory turned into architecture and then performed.
The labour of wonder
What's striking is how much physical work underwrites the sense of effortless reverie. To produce a few seconds of magic in the frame, an entire room had to be conceived, built, painted and styled in one hue, then lit and shot. That ratio — days of carpentry for a single dreamlike picture — is the quiet ethic of the genre: the fantasy is earned through craft, not conjured by a filter.
Reading it again in 2026
In a moment when any colour-flooded scene can be generated on demand, the hand-built immersion of The Color Project reads as a deliberate, almost defiant choice. The wonder lands precisely because it was real — a child genuinely stood in a genuinely red room. Broom belongs with the other world-builders in our archive who construct their images rather than capture them, from the cinematic stages of Alex Prager to the storybook reveries of Vikram Kushwah. One room, one colour, one child — and an enormous amount of love poured into making it look like a dream.